'The Deadman's Pedal' by Alan Warner is a novel of propulsive prose and rich
predicament

It is June 1973 when 15-year-old Simon Crimmons leaves school in a small port in the Highlands, with no place to go and no way of getting there, except to cadge rides with the drivers of his father’s haulage company. He has a den in the woods, where he dreams of a motorbike and of curvaceous Nikki, who lives on the nearby Brae Estate. Just one year later, Simon has a job on the railways, a shaky acquaintance with Marx, a past with Nikki, and a pregnant new girlfriend called Varie Bultitude, whose father has entertained royalty in the family’s ancestral mansion.

Alan Warner’s seventh novel is filled with rich predicament, where parallel lives collide in a creative undoing of the status quo. Simon enters the realm of railwaymen when he applies for a job by mistake (he thinks “traction” may lead to contact with nurses). On the same day, he meets Varie’s drawling, disaffected elder brother, Alex, in a bookshop, where the two decide to leave messages in Narziss and Goldmund. Alex wears an army greatcoat, Simon a British Rail uniform, yet it’s Simon who is embattled here. Too “posh” for the railways, too “working class” for Varie, he feels gloriously competent at work, as he manipulates a “320-ton enormity”, but lost at home, where his father derides “The Beatles and your long hair and skinny lassies in wee skirts”.

What draws us in to all this, however, is not really the implicit conflict between Simon’s CND badge (“I joined up. By post”) and his father’s war medals, or Nikki’s “gruff physicality” and Varie’s ethereal pallor, or even the struggle of the man-made railway with the forces of nature, which results one night in a catastrophic landslide. What compels us in these pages is the steady imperative beat of Warner’s prose, as it moves with the rhythm of the engines, “charging into the darkness” on “moonsilver track”, “over the saucer of evening lands”.

And through the whole, like a murmured catechism, are the repeated names of places: The Back Settlement, The Concession Lands, Nine Mile, The Pass, New Loch, Creach Mountain on the horseshoe curve. As the book ends, these rhythms linger. Anyone who reads it must be grateful that The Deadman’s Pedal is the first of a trilogy, and hope that Warner writes quickly.